This paper is an attempt to improve on the ability of financial management to arrive at a desirable or close to “optimal” cash balance for a firm at a point in time. There have been several comments on this subject in literature over the years including the contributions of Keynes, Hicks and Samuelson. In recent years Baumol and Beranek have presented us with more specific models. This paper tends to be more operational than the Baumol or Beranek presentations and hence tends perhaps to lose some of the sophistication of the more theoretical models; it attempts to present a reasonably operational method for providing for cash balances for transactions and precautionary purposes. But let us first examine these two models briefly.

Stephen H. Archer, Measuring the Risk Dimension of Investment Performance: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 25, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association New York, N.Y. December, 28-30, 1969 (May, 1970), pp. 493-494

G. Marc Choate, Stephen H. Archer, Irving Fisher, Inflation, and the Nominal Rate of Interest, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1975 Proceedings (Nov., 1975), pp. 675-685

The purpose of this paper is to construct a model for the computation of an optimal cash balance for a bank, although it could be adapted to any organization. By a bank we mean to include both commercial banks and savings banks (mutual savings banks and savings and loan associations). One might also be able to adapt the model to an “international bank” such as the United States holdings of gold and foreign exchange.